


Unloved Kids

by sibley (ferns)



Category: The Flash (TV 1990)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Androids, Background Poly, Everybody Lives, Gen, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Roommates, autistic characters, in THIS house we love platonic relationships, kind of bittersweet? idk man, thats about pollux. the flash can bite me.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-15
Updated: 2017-09-15
Packaged: 2018-12-30 06:07:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12102426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferns/pseuds/sibley
Summary: Alpha doesn't need to sleep. Pollux does. It doesn't matter.





	Unloved Kids

**Author's Note:**

> hey remember when I asked people to stop me from writing a self indulgent 90s flash fic and nobody stopped me...yeah.

Alpha doesn’t need to sleep. Sleeping is for organic life forms. Sometimes she’ll try, close her eyes and imitate the function of sleep, but she doesn’t actually  _ need  _ to do it. And when she pretends to sleep she isn’t really sleeping.

Pollux, on the other hand,  _ does  _ need to sleep.

Alpha likes to watch.

Pollux is a lot of things Alpha is not. Pollux is organic and breathing and much, much faster than she is. Pollux sleeps and does other things that she doesn’t have to. But they’re similar, too-they were both meant to be weapons. They both got away. They both decided that they’d had enough of Central City and moved in together.

It’s the differences, not the similarities, that are fascinating to Alpha. The fact that organic life forms  _ need  _ things like sleep. And Pollux is willing to be watched by her as long as she doesn’t touch him. Which she won’t. It’s one of the facts: Pollux doesn’t like being touched.

Facts are always listened to.

That’s not the only fact, of course. Pollux provides her with lots of facts. Facts like bullets hurt (she knows that one from experience), facts like Julio kisses nicely even if he didn’t know that he was kissing Pollux and not Barry, facts like Tina likes red flowers more than white or pink or yellow ones. Those kinds of facts. They’re not very useful for combat like Alpha’s facts but they make Pollux happy and that makes them useful in a different way.

Another fact about Pollux is that he  _ dreams. _

He wiggles around when he dreams. Alpha doesn’t touch him, of course, that’s rude since he told her not to, but she watches closely while his eyelids twitch and his fingers move like he’s trying to hold something. Sometimes he vibrates. Once did it so much that he fell through the ceiling into the apartment below theirs and Alpha had to go down and get him. That was fun. She got to meet their neighbors.

Their neighbors visit now and play cards with her. She always wins, except when she lets herself lose. (Turns out, when she chooses not to see through the cards, she’s a lousy poker player.) Pollux likes to throw the cards in the air and then try to catch them before they hit the ground while Alpha times him, but they can’t do  _ that  _ when the neighbors are over. They already think Alpha and Pollux are weird-their names and how they act and the fact that they live together but aren’t ‘seeing each other.’

Alpha thinks that’s ridiculous. Of  _ course  _ they’re seeing each other. She can see Pollux right now, lying asleep on the only bed in their apartment, and if he woke up and rolled over then  _ he  _ would be able to see  _ her.  _ That’s seeing each other, isn’t it? They’re just not romantically involved with each other and they never will be.

She’d much rather read Shelley or Butler or Norton or even  _ Asimov  _ than that. Well, she’d much rather read than a lot of things, but… Romance is very low on her list of priorities. And if she ever  _ did  _ decide to pursue something romantic with someone, it certainly would  _ not  _ be with  _ Pollux.  _ He’s a man. She’s never even considered them as viable partners. Compared to women… There’s not much they have going for them.

It’s impossible for her to think about Pollux in either of those ways anyway. He’s-Pollux. Her friend. That’s more important than romance. To her at least.

Alpha’s internal clock reads 9:15 AM. That’s about the time that Pollux usually wakes up. She leans forward and rests her chin on her hands and waits. Alpha doesn’t know  _ why  _ he usually wakes up at around this time. Despite how many things she’s memorized, she doesn’t know a whole lot about how human brains work.

Pollux wakes up slowly. He rolls over and looks at her, blinking a little. “Mmph.”

“Good morning,” Alpha says cheerfully. “Today there will be highs in the sixties and lows in the forties. How were your dreams?”

“Weird.” Pollux rolls over onto his stomach. “I think I died. And I was a fish.” 

Alpha tilts her head. “Was it weirder than the dream you had about being me and me being you?”

“No.” Pollux sits up and zooms over the closet to get some clothes. Alpha politely looks away. She’ll never understand why humans are so modest-Pollux knows that she can see through his clothes anyway, so it’s not like there’s a point to him wearing them outside of warmth. But it makes him feel more human, and Alpha supposes that she can’t judge considering she wears clothes too. It helps her blend in with the organic life forms.

“Megan’s coming over today,” Alpha informs him. She picks up the book she’s been trying to read at a normal, human pace. It’s very difficult. She’d have been able to read it ten times over if she let herself. It’s about a very stupid human who gets lost trying to get home after being gone for a long time written by someone named Homer. “She says she’ll bring snacks and books.”

Pollux perks up at the mention of snacks and rushes off. Alpha opens her book and doesn’t follow him. She’ll see if she can get another page or so in before Megan arrives. (Humans read  _ so slowly  _ it’s  _ exhaustingly  _ boring. Alpha’s sure she would enjoy the book if only she would allow herself to read it faster. But it’s a bit of a lesson in discipline this way.)

Megan shows up at noon, carrying massive bags of food that she can afford now that she’s written a book. (Alpha read it aloud to Pollux. They both agreed to lie to Megan about how much they enjoyed it for the sake of her feelings.) Pollux gets so excited his hands start flapping at super-speed, and that makes  _ Alpha’s  _ hands start flapping because she’s happy that he’s happy, and that makes Megan laugh because outside of them only Barry gets this excited when she brings food.

“I’m not Barry,” Pollux informs her seriously. “I’m Pollux.”

Megan nudges him. “I know you’re not, Blue. But you both eat the same amount.” She hands him a chocolate bar. “Different tastes, though. Barry can’t stand peanuts.”

Pollux devours everything Megan can shove at him in the blink of an eye, while Alpha carefully chooses which fruits she wants to eat. She can’t eat  _ too  _ much, her body can’t handle it-she can take in a little bit of food and convert it to energy inside of her, but if she eats too much then her circuits will start humming and she’ll ‘throw up’ the undigested food.

Alpha doesn’t know why Rossick designed her that way. It’s just something she has to live with now.

Megan doesn’t stop talking, telling them about San Francisco and how she went down to Brazil three weeks ago and recommends that Pollux run down there sometime, about how New York is overrated and she’s glad Alpha decided not to stay there for long, how Tina’s this close to making her sleep on the couch because she snores so much, how Barry and Tina and Julio are keeping her up all night with their dumb smart nerd shit, how-Alpha listens intently with one ear and tunes it out with the other so she can keep reading.

Megan brought her some more books, too, including some that Barry recommended for Alpha. She brought a picture book for Pollux as well, as a gift from Julio. Pollux is delighted. He can read just as well and as fast as Alpha can, but he still loves picture books. He likes trying to replicate the illustrations in them.

“Pollux,” Megan says, cutting off Pollux’s excited speed-talking, “Tina wants you back at the lab. Says she’s got a few more tests she wants to run on you. Nothing painful. She just wants to make sure you’re not going to expire-she’s gone through all of Brassel’s notes, and she’s pretty sure she’s figured out how to stop it from happening to you, but… She wants to make sure it’s not too late.”

There’s a long moment of solemn silence before Pollux tilts his head. “Now?”

“Nah, not now. Tomorrow, I think.” Megan looks awkwardly at Alpha. “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

“I want to.” Alpha closes her book.

She’s put thought into what will happen if Pollux dies. The notes from the people who created him say that he’ll almost definitely burn himself up into nothing as soon as he’s dead. There’s a high probability of that just happening at any random moment even without something like a fatal injury. She’s told Pollux that; Alpha would never leave him in the dark about something as important as the chances of him dying.

When he dies, no matter when it happens or how, Alpha will die too.

She has no natural lifespan-she knows that she’ll be alive long after everyone she knows is gone. Unless she chooses to end it. Alpha knows how to permanently deactivate herself. Powers told her how as a sort of… Failsafe if she ever got caught by the enemy. So that she couldn’t be hacked into and forced to give up information.

That’ll be what happens when Pollux dies. It’ll be cruel, forcing Barry and Tina and Megan (Julio too, maybe, even though she hardly knows him) to lose two friends at the same time, but… Alpha has never experienced that form of grief before. She’s read about it. That’s how she knows that she would much rather die than feel it.

If she even can. Alpha’s programming might not even allow for that kind of grief. That’d be even worse than feeling it-knowing that she  _ should  _ but being unable to.

Yes, Alpha would rather deactivate herself than go through that after the loss of her best friend.

Megan nods stiffly and goes back to talking about Paris and a nice artist named Iris with Pollux. Alpha goes back to her book.

She does not mention that the probability of Tina figuring out how to save Pollux from burning up is very low.


End file.
